Maven is a software project management tool widely used by software developers to manage software projects, and in particular to centrally archive, within a Maven repository, those artifacts/binaries that comprise a project, and to then use the artifacts from virtually any system.
Generally, each artifact is identified with Maven coordinates that are a unique combination of an Artifact Id, Group Id, Version, and Type. A project's attributes are stored in a Maven Project Object Model (POM) file. The artifacts required to manage a project can be downloaded from a remote repository, and dumped into a user-specific local repository. Maven then picks up these artifacts from the local repository whenever it needs them.
A challenge arises when existing non-Maven projects must be converted to Maven artifacts. Often, such projects utilize a Java Archive (Jar) file as a reusable binary. Maven provides an install-file goal to deploy a Jar file into the Maven repository as a Maven artifact, but with severe limitations. For example, the goal requires passing the Maven coordinates manually to the install-file command; and also ignores any dependencies included in the Jar file. Instead, the goal only creates a default empty POM file with the coordinates.
Dependencies can be manually deployed to a repository after reading their location from a manifest file. However, it is difficult to resolve dependencies that are based on the Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi), a module system and service platform for the Java programming language that implements a complete and dynamic component model. Since the location of a dependent Jar is not directly available in the manifest file, only an OSGi class loader understands the OSGi based dependencies of the Jar. An OSGi based-Jar is defined with a unique OSGi identification, and not with its location. However, a Maven POM file without dependencies cannot be used for building a project. This is the general area that embodiments of the invention are intended to address.